Beyond the Workshop Evaluation Sheet: Or, How to REALLY Evaluate Training.

Effective training isn't easy, and it isn't cheap. For employers, it means investing in course fees, employee downtime, and trainer costs. Before you make that investment, you want to make sure that the course, seminar, or workshop you're paying for is actually going to achieve its goals. The best way to do that, of course, is through evaluation.

Unfortunately, most training program evaluation is done badly.  That’s unfortunate, because only  evaluation can tell you whether or not the training actually worked.

So how do you do it right?

By realizing it's not enough to simply ask the returning trainee how they felt about the training. If you really want to know whether training is achieving what you hope it will, you need to measure four distinct things:

1. Reaction: How did the trainee feel about the training experience?
2. Learning: Did the trainee actually acquire the skills and knowledge that were defined as training goals in the learning objectives?
3. Application: Is the trainee using the newly acquired skills or knowledge in his/her workplace?
4. Impact: Are the new skills and knowledge actually having an impact on quality of the employee's work and your organization's performance?

Let's look at those one by one.

1) Evaluating Reaction.

Reaction evaluation is the easiest and most common form of training evaluation. It consists simply of asking the trainees to describe how they felt about the training event, and is usually measured during or immediately after a training event or program. Methods of evaluating trainee reaction include:

• a reaction sheet at the end of each course; 
• a weekly reaction sheet;
• a suggestion box;
• trainer observation;
• a third-party observer;
• a trainee’s committee, formed specifically to give regular feedback to the trainers, and act as trainee spokespeople.

Evaluating Reaction is a good thing. It can help a trainer to correct problems in the program, or identify individual training needs. But it doesn't really tell you very much about what went on, other than how the trainee felt about the content, the facilities, and the trainer. And unfortunately most training evaluation stops there.

2) Evaluating Learning

You initiated this training for a reason: you (or an employee) needed to acquire new skills and knowledge. If your objectives for this training were clear, then evaluating learning is easy: the process consists simply of determining whether or not the training enabled learners to do what the learning objectives said they’d be able to do.

Can the participant prepare a 100% accurate balance sheet? Can the participant make a pot of coffee within five minutes? Can the participant fold a parachute without making a mistake? If those were the learning objectives, and the learning objectives were met, then the training, at that level, was successful.

Some ways of measuring Learning:

• written tests: useful for evaluating transfer of knowledge or information. It's important to ensure that all trainees have the required language skills to respond, and that trainers offer the option of verbal testing for those with special language needs.
• demonstration: have the trainees actually perform the skill they were were assigned to learn.
• assignment: give the returning trainee an assignment that requires that they demonstrate mastery of the course content.

3) Evaluating Application

While it's usually the trainer who evaluates reaction and learning, this one is up to you, the employer. To assess the effectiveness of the training, you need to ask: Is the trainee actually using their newly acquired skills or knowledge?

Obviously the first step is creating opportunities for returning trainees to apply their new skills in the workplace. If you've sent someone on a supervisory skills course, but they have no-one to supervise, you can't evaluate application; if you've sent them to study the most recent Microsoft Office Suite but they're coming back home to their clunky old Window XP applications, you've wasted their time and your money.

A consistent failure on the part of trainees to apply their learning “back home” sends an important message. It may mean that the needs assessment failed to identify a trainee’s real needs, or it may mean that course content is inappropriate or out of date.

Some tools to assess application:

• a follow-up questionnaire, written or conducted as a telephone interview, directed to the trainees three to six months after completion of the training program, inviting them to re-assess the value of the course content, and make suggestions about what additional content should be included.
• a follow-up questionnaire, written or conducted as a telephone interview, to the trainees’ employer, inviting them to comment on the degree to which the trainee has used his/her new skills in the workplace.

4) Evaluating Impact

As we said at the beginning, good training is expensive; whether you're a business, government department or not-for-profit, you invest in training because you expect it to have a measurable and positive impact on your organization.

So - did it? Has the training improved your bottom line? The quality of your output? The level of employee satisfaction?  And can you measure the change?

As you can see, there's a lot more to training evaluation than that simple questionnaire that asks you to rate "handouts" on a scale of 1 to 5. Not everyone evaluates every training event and program to the depth we've just described. But if you care about the actual impact of training on your staff, your clients, and your organizational outcomes - give it some thought.